1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates in general to information analysis and more particularly to organization of information concerning relationships among pairs of text items.
2. Description of the Related Art
An affinity is a measure of association between different items. A person may want to know an affinity among items in order to identify or better understand possible correlation or relationships between items such as events, interests, people or products. An affinity may be useful to predict preferences. For instance, an affinity may be used to predict that a person interested in one subject matter also is likely to be interested in another subject matter. Specifically, for example, an affinity may be used to predict that a person who purchases a particular book is likely to be interested in purchasing one or more other specific books or that a person who plays a particular video game on-line is likely to be interested in playing one or more other video games.
FIG. 1 is an illustrative drawing of a computer user interface screen showing a hypothetical affinity analysis result. The affinity analysis result shows affinity among three automobiles: Honda Accord Sedan, Toyota Camry and Ford Taurus. In this example, the primary vehicle in the affinity analysis is the Honda Accord Sedan. A left portion of the screen shows user control buttons used to select vehicles for which an affinity analysis is to be performed. In this example, the primary vehicle in the affinity analysis is the Honda Accord Sedan. The other vehicles are the Toyota Camry and the Ford Taurus. The time frame for the analysis is December 2002. A top part of the center portion of the screen shows a Venn diagram style graphical representation of an affinity of Accord Sedan for Camry and of an affinity of Accord Sedan for Taurus. The degree of overlap of the Accord Sedan circle with the Camry circle graphically represents the affinity of the Accord Sedan with the Camry. Likewise, the degree of overlap of the Accord Sedan circle with the Taurus circle graphically represents the affinity of the Accord Sedan with the Camry. The overlaps represent the degree of affinity. A bottom part of the center portion of the screen provides a table showing affinities among the three autos. The top row of the chart shows a numerical measure of the strength of the affinity of the Accord Sedan to the Camry (23.7%) and to the Taurus (3.1%). A middle row shows a strength of the affinity of the Camry to the Accord (30.6%) and Taurus (4.2%). A bottom row shows a strength of the affinity of the Taurus to the Accord (18.3%) and to the Camry (19.2%). A right portion of the screen shows a table that lists strengths of affinities of the primary vehicle in rank order to the fifteen vehicles with the strongest affinities. In this example, the table on the right also lists the affinity of the primary vehicle to each other auto (i.e., Taurus, no. 63) selected on the left for affinity analysis even if the other auto is not in the top fifteen affinities.
An affinity analysis may be used to find similar keywords for a given keyword. For example, the following list is a hypothetical example list of keywords that may be found through a hypothetical affinity analysis to be similar to the keyword “007”.